The Farmer in the dell…

Today was Farmer’s Market day. I got a call from Jeremy asking if I’d like to hand out flyers at the Farmer’s Market in downtown Des Moines. You bet! So, I stopped by John’s house (our main meetup organizer) and picked up a bunch of flyers from him. The meetup here does something cool. They take a flyer, insert a slimjim (not the tasty meat product) and staple a piece of candy to the outside.

I met Jeremy around 9:30, we parked, grabbed a couple of boxes of flyers and headed for the market. Jeremy has some 6th sense about these things, and instinctively headed right for the busiest corner of the market. He was handing those flyers out so fast that his hands were a blur. I’m more of a wanderer, and so I started walking up and down the streets handing out the flyers to people. I was amazed at how well it went. I’m not what you would call a charismatic person, so I can only assume that Iowans are much more open to receiving literature or they really like candy.

After I had handed out flyers for about half an hour, I was tapped on the shoulder by a polite lass who asked me if I had permission to hand out flyers. Huh? Isn’t this America? Well, technically, as it turned out, no it wasn’t. It seems that the Farmer’s Market organization leases the street from Des Moines and if while we were welcome to hand out flyers, we would have to pay $45 dollars and stand in the designated “Community Corner”. She was very nice and told me that since the Market was half over, we only needed to pay $25. I wasn’t willing to do that, so I told her I would find my partner and ask him what he wanted to do.

Jeremy was so straightforward in his response that I wanted to start singing the Star Spangled banner right there. “So, what you’re saying is that they are leasing the street from me, and I have to get permission to be here.” And then he said that if they talked to him that he would handle it.

It was about that time that Jeff, one of our national guys showed up with a double Ron Paul sign on a stick. I talked to him about it, and he started to explain the legalities to me, when one of the Farmer’s market crew interrupted him to tell us that as long as we didn’t block traffic, we could do what we wanted. Cool. So off I went. Every now and then when I would get weary (“No! I’m voting for Hillary! I love that woman!”) I would look up and see that sign bobbing above the people, and I’d take a deep breath and start again.

The response was really quite wonderful, all in all. Most people were open and happy to hear about a new candidate. However, most had not ever heard about him, so clearly we have our work cut out for us.

After, I went back to my foster home and crashed for several hours. Then up to respond to some out of state volunteers (nice talking with you, Jason!), and make plans for tomorrow.